Memorability – Worth remembering

April 28, 2014

Mobile users take 1.4 Billion photographs per day with one goal of capturing the moment forever. We, at VocalBee, have created an algorithm to calculate a score (RecallRank) between 1 and 10. The higher the RecallRank for an image, the greater the chance that people will remember it.

Image memorability is the extent to which a photograph is remembered. An interesting research at MIT has found that the properties of the image are what make a photograph memorable and a highly memorable image is not subjective to human taste.
Though there is no hard and fast rule for an image to have a high memorability score, photos with people and enclosed spaces have high recall rank. Beautiful high-resolution pictures of scenery and outdoor pictures without people have low memorability.
We decided to scan some of the photos tweeted at Boston Marathon 2014 and calculate their memorability. Began in 1897, Boston Marathon is the world’s oldest annual marathon. This marathon is hosted by several cities in Greater Boston in eastern Massachusetts on Patriots’ Day.